About This Forum

CityCyclingEdinburgh was launched on the 27th of October 2009 as "an experiment".

It soon became useful and entertaining. There are regular posters, people who add useful info occasionally and plenty more who drop by to watch.
That's fine. If you want to add news/comments it's easy to register and become a member.

"Cyclists on the Bealach: There has been issues with cyclists not allowing vehicle traffic to pass, focussing on "personal best" times, rather than on road safety. If this continues, it was felt that cyclists might need to be restricted to using the Bealach at particular times of the day"

Saw this on a FB page (as a picture), from what I assume it is from the Applecross Community Council, but I can't find it online.

I imagine, having cycled on the Bealach, that those people are surprised a bike won't move over on the single track parts to be close passed by whomever it is is revving up behind. There are tonnes of passing places, and I must admit that I was surprised at how few vehicles I actually came up against (I've been up it 4 times) and realised it was because they were mostly jamming each other up at other passing places.

What an awful statement. Reads like someone having a rant reworded to sound slightly more official. Even the opening "There has been issues" is like someone wrote "There has been an issue" then went back to make it plural.

Bealach na ba is one of the iconic Scottish climbs and one of my favourites. It starts out easy, and builds into some alpine switchbacks. Really tough but fun climb.

I've always done it starting from Applecross, riding up around the headland and then around to the bottom of the Bealach. About 65km or so with lots of up-down. Then you climb the pass to the top from almost sea level which is excellent. The decent is also absolutely fantastic. You can desend far faster than the cars and motorbikes (unless they're insane) and at the bottom there is the fantastic Applecross Inn.

You can never go terribly fast on twisty single-track roads, but there are motorists who think no one should drive faster than them, however slow.

On one occasion, a driver who I had tailed for miles because he had failed to pull over and let me pass – despite police road signs to allow overtaking – got out and started angrily remonstrating that we were “not on the M25”.

Goodness knows how he would fare on that Sutherland road now it’s part of the North Coast 500, although the reckless speeders that it has reportedly attracted are even worse than road hogs like him.

Arguably, with all this hassle negotiating such roads – and their traffic – it can be difficult to properly take in the scenery.

A classic example of how clever branding can have unforeseen consequences is the North Coast 500 (NC500). The 516-mile route that runs in a loop from Inverness to Applecross to Durness to John o’Groats and back to Inverness has existed for decades, its twists and turns appreciated at a leisurely pace by those who love to explore lonely, brooding spaces. But in 2015, the North Highland Initiative (NHI) decided to market it as Scotland’s answer to Route 66; a real-life board game, where players travel from square to square, collecting photographs and “passport” stamps. People literally go there, do that and buy the T-shirt (and the baseball caps and the bumper stickers) though not necessarily in that order.

At Balnakeil Craft Village near the north-westerly tip of Scotland, former anthropologist Anita Wilson, who runs Cast-Off Crafts, observes the NC500 bucket-listers with a sceptical eye. “A lot of people walk in and immediately announce that they are ‘doing’ the route: it’s like a badge of honour,” she says. “Sometimes they apologise for doing it the wrong way, and I say: ‘Well, there isn’t a wrong way. It’s two-way traffic. I’ve been driving on it since the 1980s.’ Farmers were probably driving cattle down it in the 1700s.

“You look at these folk with their matching T-shirts and you wonder: ‘Do you not have an identity other than this?’ It’s this weird kind of sheep mentality. I bet if you sent up a drone to take an aerial view of the 500, it would look like a Scaletrix track with all the cars just whizzing round, one after the other.”

According to one study, the NC500 marketing initiative brought an extra 29,000 people and £9m to the Highland’s economy in its first year, while increasing traffic by 10 per cent.